Best Practices

How do companies expanding into international markets maintain their focus on putting the customer at the heart of the business across widely different markets?  In the second part of my blog, I share some of the key lessons I have learned from over a decade spent working with leading global brands. Below are some critical tips for implementing a successful global Customer Experience Management (CEM) programme in any geography that will help your brand to ensure global consistency while addressing local customer needs.

1. Engage staff

In some markets the opportunity for learning from customer feedback is a new (and perhaps not entirely trusted) experience. Employees need to understand from the beginning what the CEM programme represents and how it can help to improve the customer experience and drive customer loyalty and advocacy.  It is essential that the business is transparent about its expectations for the programme, how it will be used and the benefits it will deliver. In turn, you will have highly engaged employees, which have been proven to dramatically improve the customer experience.

2. Interpret feedback in the relevant context

Insights must be locally grounded in order to be meaningful. Far too often, global CEM programmes are set up centrally and key local components are missed, leading to inaccurate assumptions. For example, programmes are often designed to look at feedback in relation to weekends versus weekdays; however, in many places in the world, the ‘weekend’ is actually Friday/Saturday – or, in some places, Thursday/Friday. If your programme auto-defines ‘weekends’ and does not adjust for different market definitions, the insights generated will be deeply flawed.

Markets – at regional or even city level – can also vary dramatically within countries. This focus on market relevancy is core to Empathica’s (A Mindshare Technologies Company) engagement in global CEM, forming a key part of what we deliver to our clients’ global programmes.

3. Target opportunities that most impact on your customers

An effective CEM programme will incorporate a local action-planning tool that focuses effort on the areas that mean the most to your local customers. Empathica works to assure these focus areas are analytically derived, experience honed and strategically relevant. And once local managers know how they are currently performing on those key focus areas, they will want to know how to improve. Social sharing of best practices that work within your business – within your market – is a huge benefit to rapidly improving performance. Offering a tool that assists managers to see how others have effectively overcome challenges and removed barriers to improve performance is an invaluable component to driving customer experience consistency across locations.

4. Engage with customers

Typically, 80% of your customers are actually having pretty good experiences – and often your staff are making a positive difference. The problem is that staff rarely hear about those great experiences.  Customer WOWs are an important part of an effective CEM programme. It is critical to make it easy for your customers to share those great moments – and share those comments directly with your store/restaurant teams. That recognition of great work supports your teams’ continued positive engagement with customers, your brand and the CEM programme.

When your customers say they had a great experience and are highly likely to recommend your brand, Empathica makes it easy for them to do exactly that with Social Sharing, a unique, patented social media advocacy platform allows your customers to broadcast their good experience to their social media networks. And the good news travels fast!  Social Sharing has delivered over 1.5 million brand recommendations to over 180 million potential customers in the past three years.

5. Celebrate success

Employees will do what gets measured, but they will repeat what gets rewarded. Including opportunities to recognise and reward engagement and establishing a positive cycle of engagement early on brings huge benefits, including building trust within the business.  Celebrating performance lets teams know that their efforts are recognised and encourages repeating that good behaviour.

Well-designed global CEM programmes can add enormous value to businesses that seek to develop their international profile and can deliver strong rewards in customer loyalty and advocacy. And those two outcomes drive measurably improved business performance in sales, increased average spend and more frequent return. The combination of improved business performance and enhanced customer experience helps businesses thrive in a highly competitive global market.

The festive season may be over but the end of the busiest shopping season is not yet in sight for retailers. The January sales are in full swing, with brands vying for the attention of consumers on the hunt for a bargain and ready to spend those Christmas gift vouchers.

And, to add to the High Street havoc, thousands of us are also hitting the shops this month to return unwanted goods. An estimated 40% of clothing and between 5% and 10% of electrical goods and homewares bought via the internet or catalogues are returned to stores by shoppers. This seasonal rush sees many customers visit stores for the first time to return unwanted gifts purchased by others.

So what can retailers do to ensure they stand out from the competition and provide a great customer experience during the sales mayhem?

Step 1. Multiple channels, one experience

This time of year sees many goods bought online returned to brick-and-mortar stores, as many brands offer a free in-store returns service. Multi-channel experiences form the component parts of the customer’s overall journey—incorporating product research online, store visits, purchase and social media interaction with the brand, and recommendations or complaints to friends and family.

Customer opinions of your brand are formed over time across these channels. You may see them as separate, but customers view them as one brand experience. It is important for brands to deliver a consistent experience, delivering the same brand promise at each point of their customers’ journey—right through to the possible return of goods for a refund or product exchange.

If a store’s return process works well, first time visitors will consider coming back. If not, they will view this as reflective of the overall experience and may stay away. Feedback programmes can ensure each channel is consistent with the desired brand experience, enabling businesses to maintain a strong brand identity across what may be disparate parts of their operations.

Step 2. The human touch

By taking steps to enhance a customer’s overall experience, you can make them feel good and further differentiate your customer experience from other brands. Little things can make a big difference. A friendly welcome upon entering a store can make a great first impression to shoppers battling their way through sales crowds; shop floor staff can direct customers to what they’re looking for with ease and provide up-to-date stock information via mobile devices; and a friendly word at the checkout with clear information about refunds and returns policies can complete a great in-store experience.

Forging a human connection with shoppers can also help grow turnover. Empathica retail studies show a thoughtful product suggestion from a staff member can increase basket sizes by up to 30%.

Step 3. Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes

Store layouts change to accommodate sale items. At best, this can confuse customers; at worst, it can irritate. Examine every aspect of the store environment, starting from the outside looking in, all the way through to what is experienced as a customer leaves. Include all staff interaction points, from shop floor advisors to checkouts and returns desks. Ensure they build, rather than detract from, a great customer experience.

At sales times, more than any other, these elements are potential key moments to deliver the brand promise and consistency in operations to ensure every visit is a perfect one. Getting these details right will generate considerable goodwill among new and existing customers at a busy time of year. By delivering a consistent, well-executed experience, shoppers will visit more, spend more, and become active brand advocates.

The holiday season has come and gone. You invested substantial time and resources into creating exceptional retail experiences during the busiest and most profitable shopping season of the year. Now, as consumers steadily head to brick-and-mortar stores in search of great post-holiday deals, and you make way for spring merchandise, value isn’t all shoppers are looking for. They also expect exceptional customer experiences, which makes the post-holiday shopping season no time to slack off.

There are several ways retailers can create consistently high-quality experiences after the holidays and drive a continuous stream of customer loyalty and advocacy through 2014. Read our top 7 below:

1. Multichannel Integration

The showrooming concept is grounded in the fact that online-only retailers are missing a decision-making channel that customers value (the physical in-store experience). By leveraging physical store space to offer enhanced multichannel shopping opportunities, brick-and-mortar retailers can capture business from online competitors. When done well, multichannel integration combines online, social, mobile and in-store resources to deliver an experience that far surpasses the experiences offered by online competitors.

2. Deliver on Your Brand Promise

Successful retail is about more than product quality. When a customer enters a retail establishment, they expect to find a pleasant, enjoyable atmosphere and respectful, attentive staff. When executed correctly, these attributes can make customers feel happier, healthier or more attractive.

Brands typically struggle to quantify and measure these feelings, making it difficult to adjust customer experiences at the local level. The challenge for businesses this year is to implement technologies that will help them better understand the branded behaviors that elicit these feelings and to create customer experiences that are more engaging and satisfying.

Retailers can reinforce the behaviors that strengthen consumer-brand relationships or change behaviors to address customer needs and create a more desirable customer experience.

3. Customer Service

Customer service is an area in which brick-and-mortar retailers can excel, especially since many pure-play online retailers often have no in-person support. The key is to avoid populating stores with inexperienced sales teams who can’t help customers with questions about the products. It’s important to adequately train all sales team members to provide exceptional service and to monitor the quality of customer service by collecting structured and unstructured customer feedback during this busy shopping time of year.

4. Amplify Customer Feedback

Regardless of the time of year, it’s important for retail brands to aggressively monitor customer feedback through structured surveys as well as unsolicited reviews posted via social media channels. Using listening and monitoring technologies, positive customer feedback can be identified and amplified to promote repeat business. Responsive, offline treatment of negative messages or concerns can even encourage dissatisfied customers to give your brand a second chance.

5. Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is funnel massive amounts of unanalyzed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights. Rather than overwhelming your managers, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the floor. Empower them with real-time guest feedback insights, pre-analyzed to clearly show local restaurant issues and opportunities for taking action and seeing improvement.

6. Share Knowledge

Location managers frequently encounter guest experience challenges they haven’t seen before. But the challenges that are new to one location manager are often challenges that have already been encountered by a manager at a different location. Knowledge-sharing technologies offer a convenient way to tap into the brand’s aggregate experience and provide location managers with the resources to overcome nearly any customer experience management obstacle.

7. Break Down Big Data

Big data, or data collected from large and complex data sets, offers several insights into customer experience improvements for retailers. However, local brand managers often have difficulty understanding how to leverage data at the local level. To overcome this barrier between general consumer insights and localized action, retailers should provide research-based advice and coaching to local managers in an effort to help individualize and improve local customer experiences.

Whether shoppers are interacting with your brand for the first time or fiftieth, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what will bring customers back all year long. Implement these strategies, and you’ll achieve longer-term customer loyalty success and brand advocacy.

With stories of Black Friday UK shopper mayhem all over the news closely followed by Cyber Monday, it’s clear the Christmas shopping season is well and truly upon us. Scores of customers are headed to your brick-and-mortar stores in search of great deals.

But value isn’t all festive shoppers are looking for. Across the board, consumers are also hoping to find exceptional customer experiences that allow them to shop on their terms, using the newest technologies to drive their choices.

For many retailers, this is the “make or break” time of year, accounting for 30 to 70 percent of their annual sales. The point often missed is that while a 30-day shopping window determines survival, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what brings customers back and determines longer term success.

Improving customer experiences

There is clearly an imperative for exceptional customer experiences at this time of year. Since the festive season represents many consumers’ first interaction with your brand, your ability to bring seasonal buyers back after Christmas hinges on the quality of your customers’ experiences this month. This may be your only time to create a positive impression.

But relatively few brands emphasise the delivery of high quality customer experiences in the Christmas rush. Far too often, customer service takes a backseat to moving as much product as possible with little regard to the experience surrounding it. Although it may be necessary to staff up stores with inexperienced, seasonal workers, temporary staffing without adequate training and a clear sense of company mission to deliver a great retail experience presents a serious threat to the brand.

Alongside an investment in experience training, it’s critical to provide near real time customer feedback in order to stay on track and keep serving up great experiences as a top of mind activity for all staff. Here are a few simple ways to do so:

Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is to funnel massive amounts of unanalysed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights, especially during the year’s busiest shopping season. Rather than overwhelming managers with information that really isn’t useful, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the shop floor. Empower them with real-time customer feedback insights that make clear in just a few minutes what their local store issues are and what they should work on to provide great experiences.

Provide Actionable “Right Now” Strategies

Complex retail reporting tools are in abundance but they don’t always make clear today’s winning moves. Providing actionable, data-based strategies that can be acted upon “right now” is essential. Store managers need to be freed up as local leaders to focus on the rapid implementation and execution of plans to improve the quality of the customer experience throughout the Christmas shopping season.

Leverage Social Learning

It takes time for store managers to learn how to intuitively respond to customers’ concerns. But collectively, your brands’ store managers have a vast base of knowledge about specific strategies and actions that can improve the customer experience during the Christmas season. Consider leveraging virtual knowledge sharing and other technologies that enable social learning across the brand.

In many ways, Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools are your brands’ best resources for improving local customer experiences during the festive season. By implementing the right technologies, you can significantly increase your ability to provide location managers with the real-time, actionable insights they need to truly delight Christmas shoppers and keep them coming back throughout 2014 – and that should add up to a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

When you have to collect a set number of survey responses by a certain date, using paper questionnaires can seem seductively easy; they’re quick and easy to set up and, given the right audience and subject matter, you can guarantee to achieve your response target.

However, before you leap into the familiar, there are a number of factors to consider first:

Cost

The costs of paper, printing, and postage are all on the rise and we are all trying to move towards more sustainable and environmentally friendly communication methods. The cost savings alone of switching to online surveys can be a significant motivator to make the change.  In contrast, it can be costly to buy screens, tablets and specialist kits to collect feedback. One of the huge benefits of Empathica’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) programmes is that no additional investment in equipment or hardware is needed.

Survey flexibility

If you are considering open-ended questions for your survey, providing ample space for the respondent to complete their answer is crucial. Paper surveys will always have limitations on space, and sometimes are deliberately restricted to avoid respondents writing War and Peace, and therefore minimise the transcription or scanning workload required.

Web-based surveys are far more flexible than paper-based ones. It is very easy to add multiple text areas that the respondent can fill in, enabling you to collect valuable customer feedback. In return, all feedback is reported online and can be easily analysed in order to drive action plans to improve customer experience. You can’t include drop-down boxes, interactive slider controls and star-rating controls, clickable maps and images, or multimedia files on paper – all features that make the process more user-friendly and appealing to the respondent.

Time

Executing paper-based surveys takes valuable time. Whether administration is in-person, mailed or sent as an email attachment, speed is always going to be a factor. The labour and time involved in handling all that paper and postage costs are also factors to take into account.  In addition, once you have collected all your responses, data entry will be required in order to get the information into an accessible and usable format in your database and reporting systems. Multi-page or complex paper surveys may also require scanning to collect and organise data.

Online surveys however, can be used to collect data in very little time. Online surveys can be delivered to your target audience via email or social media networks within minutes. Because of this rapid distribution, your sample population can respond almost immediately, and data is collected automatically. Empathica’s CEM programmes can also provide real-time analysis tools so you can track the progress of your survey and its results.

Accuracy

Data entry accuracy is very high with online surveys, subject to misspellings and mistakes that the respondent may make. Respondents provide their feedback directly, avoiding the risk of errors creeping in with separate data entry from a paper-based response.
One huge advantage of online surveys is when you analyse your results. Modern filtering systems enable you to scrutinise any aspect of your responses with ease; for example, you can read through a group of comments from people that answered a question a specific way, providing a targeted view of subjective feedback.

Access

One of the frequent arguments for paper surveys is that non-tech savvy respondents may not have the required access to a computer and the Internet to complete an online survey via email or on social media networks. However, with Empathica, there is the option of leaving responses using interactive telephone technology accessed through a free phone number.

Technological advances and the adoption of the Internet, smart phones and tablets have revolutionised how leading organisations collect survey data efficiently, cost effectively with almost real time reporting. However, simply changing the way you gather feedback won’t drive change. You have to take what your customers are saying and turn that feedback into action plans that will drive experience improvements.

One of the major benefits of using an online CEM programme is that it makes it easier to analyse customer feedback to identify key insights for individual locations. These can be used to drive actions and implement changes that will make a real difference to customers’ experiences.

If you become the type of company that not only listens to customers, but also acts on their feedback, your customers will return to your locations, become active brand advocates and recommend your brand to friends, family and followers.

If you know the importance of listening to your customers and have been collecting customer feedback… you’re off to a great start! But have you done anything with it? Some of you may have read through each one of your customer comments and others may have analyzed the data and created good looking charts. But did your customer experience change for the better because of it?

Think of customer feedback as a two-way street. According to the Empathica Consumer Insights Panel, consumers are more than willing to provide brands with their feedback, but only 46% believe that brands use it to make changes to the customer experience. If your customers are willing to take the time to voice their opinion to help you improve your customer experience, it’s important that you demonstrate that you are acting on the feedback they provide to give them a better experience with your brand and locations. You do this by gathering feedback in two ways:

Ask the right questions

The feedback you get from your customers is only as valuable as the questions you ask them. Your survey questions should be reflective of your brand and accurately capture the brand experience you strive to deliver.

Look for answers outside of your surveys

A lot of things could be said about you but they don’t usually come in the survey form. Online reviews, call center transcriptions, direct feedback email, open-ended survey comments are all opportunities where you can understand trends in what customers are saying about you.

Simply gathering feedback won’t drive change however. You have to take what your customers are saying and turn that feedback into action plans that will drive experience improvements. Sound complicated? It’s really not and here’s how you can do it:

Know where to find insights relevant to you

The volume of feedback coming from multiple channels can be too overwhelming for any location manager to read through. They shouldn’t have to browse through all the feedback channels and use different tools to determine the patterns. In fact, our 3rd party Feedback and Text Analytics solution provides an end-to-end view of multiple channels such as social media recommendations, online reviews, call center transcriptions, direct feedback email, and open-ended survey comments in one central application.

Turn insights into actions

3rd Party Feedback and Text Analytics allows locations to drill down to key issues and take concrete action to resolve issues. For example, when negative sentiments arise about fries, location managers should be able to find out what is being said about the fries in seconds – is it too cold? Too greasy? Or too pricey? By filtering the comments, your location manager can determine the most common word related to “negative fries.” By quickly identifying the real issue that exists within their location, location managers can implement an action plan to fix this issue and coach staff on how to do it.

Become the type of company that not only listens but also act on it. In return, your customers will return to your locations, become active brand advocates and recommend your brand to friends, family and followers.

I recently received an email inviting me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey from one of my favorite online outdoor equipment retailers. I freely admit that I only opened it out of competitive curiosity. When I opened the email, and it promised to take only two minutes and ask two simple questions, I exclaimed, ‘An NPS survey! ROCK ON!’

But that was me speaking as the survey taker. As a data scientist and survey analyst, I recognized the shortcomings of an NPS-style survey. There’s no way to control the data points in the sample, so this equipment retailer wouldn’t be getting the data required to slice and dice my results in interesting and meaningful ways.

For example, they wouldn’t be able to narrow results down to a particular type of service, a particular shift, or a distinct product. They wouldn’t even be able to do a basic regression analysis to identify key drivers. On the other hand, is it really worth it to swing the opposite way and create an experience-killing 47-question survey? Probably not.

Which brings up one of the major conundrums faced by VoC practitioners today:

There is a fundamental disconnect between the way customers want to share their experiences and the way researchers want to control the scientific sampling of information. The result is friction in the feedback process.

No More “Us Vs. Them”

Consumers want fewer questions. Companies want robust analysis. The smart companies are doing what the consumer wants—but the even smarter companies are finding ways to satisfy the interests of both parties.

Today, there are ways to begin cutting the length and overall friction from your satisfaction surveys today, without sacrificing your useful back-end insights. Here are three things I would recommend to any forward-thinking customer experience practitioner trying to find the fabled frictionless feedback:

1. Use the Power of Text Analytics

Shorter surveys don’t have to mean smaller data sets, as long as you’re asking the right questions and taking advantage of powerful natural language processing engines. Mindshare Monitor™ and Mindshare Discover™ are both supercomputing solutions that can extract profound structured meaning from free-form text.

Learn all you can about using this powerful technology, experiment with it, and find out which of your survey questions have become redundant.

2. Separate Your Feedback Channels

Just because you’re favoring shorter surveys doesn’t mean you have to completely give up on longer market research-style surveys. You can dedicate separate feedback channels to administering two separate surveys simultaneously:

1. A short review-style survey that any customer can comfortably complete.
2. A longer research-style survey providing granular details for analysing new product introductions or marketing research.

Your goal should be to offer your customers a good feedback experience while still collecting enough data to power other types of analytics.

3. Shorten Surveys

Identify which data points are the most important to your goals—and ruthlessly eliminate the rest. Not only will this provide a better experience to your customers, it will drastically simplify analysis. If you’re collecting more data points than you need, you might be creating more questions than you are answers. If you can’t arrive at a decisive action after asking yourself a “so what” question, consider eliminating the metric.

For example, a restaurant survey may have a question inviting the customer to “rate our tabletop displays.” You learn you have an average rating of 73 out of 100. So what? Well, it means your displays should be better. So what? Well, a 10% increase in those ratings should mean people learned more about your product. So what? You get the picture.

Think Forward and Implement Now

Customer tastes and preferences around survey-taking behavior are changing. The forward-thinking customer experience practitioner will see this as an opportunity to start implementing the most advanced review-oriented survey techniques to provide a great frictionless feedback experience to customers—while collecting an even broader data set.

Restaurants, bars and pubs rise and fall based on the experiences they provide to their guests. This can be particularly challenging for multi-unit operators where location managers must walk a fine line between maintaining a consistent brand experience and tailoring the experience to the demands of local patrons.

Managing the Guest Experience

An optimised CEM model should be a priority for any hospitality brand that values the quality of local guest experiences – and it begins with a three-step strategy designed to equip managers with the resources they need to quickly transform guest insights into tangible actions.

Focused Insights

Sending large quantities of unfocused guest feedback to location managers is a losing strategy. Today’s most advanced CEM solutions can empower location managers with daily action plans based on the most recent feedback insights for their location and across the brand. Using sophisticated CEM technology, managers can have an action plan in place within minutes of receiving relevant and location-specific guest feedback information.

Action-Focused Tools

While hospitality chains employ sophisticated feedback solutions, most location managers don’t possess the skills and training it takes to derive meaningful insights from complex reports. A better approach is for brands to equip location managers with technologies that do the work for them. Ideally, managers will be given access to solutions that present focus areas for improvement in a simple, clear user interface.

Shared Knowledge

The social knowledge-sharing capabilities offered by leading CEM solutions can provide several benefits. Less experienced managers gain access to virtual knowledge centres and other resources that work to fill gaps in their brand experience. Additionally, fostering this type of communication within a brand helps to build the brand’s internal community. Regardless of the amount of experience, all location managers have the ability to turn guest feedback data into specific improvement actions that can be shared as best practices brand-wide. This crowd-sourcing helps ensure a consistent brand experience and optimises the value of guest feedback insights.

A higher level of guest satisfaction (and ultimately brand advocacy) is being achieved through the implementation of CEM solutions and other technologies that give hospitality brands the ability to use guest feedback as a key driver of location performance. Instead of giving location managers more data that they need to wade through, these solutions equip managers with the actionable strategies they need to achieve meaningful improvements in the guest experience.

With a fresh NBA season kicking off, one of the story lines I’ll have my eyes on is the progression of Jeremy Lin’s career. Like many sports fans I became quite caught up in the #Linsanity phenomenon last season and am looking forward to seeing what he can do in his starting role in Houston.

When it comes to how he will do, I think most people have two questions when it comes to his basketball potential.

1. Can he play in the NBA?
2. Can he play at the level he played at last year for a full season?

If #Linsanity proved one thing , the answer to question number one is a yes. Question number two is trickier and requires the young point guard to be able to sustain a consistent level of performance for a full season, perhaps the playoffs, for many years to come.

Variations of these two questions are what retailers are asked of when it comes to business success.

1. Does a retailer have a unique offering that addresses the market?
2. Does a retailer offer a consistently great experience that can scale their growth?

Like the young point guard most, if not all, retailers can answer an unequivocal yes to question number one.  After all defining a unique offering is the first paragraph of most business plans. The trickier part is question number two. Particularly in a fast growing brand, maintaining a level of consistent execution can be a challenge. But brands that are successful, the ones that separate themselves from the pack and reach iconic status, are the ones who have this operational consistency.

There is help out there for brands who want to achieve consistency but aren’t quite sure how. Today’s customer experience management (CEM) programs are focused on helping brands to first uncover what elements are most important to a great experience, and also help brands with action driving tools to make sure those key elements are delivered on in a consistent manner.

These programs work by focusing on location excellence and help location managers to do their jobs better by:

Providing program accountability to local managers

Customer experience programs don’t work if locations ignore them. A CEM program should turn complex customer feedback into simple, relevant insights and clear actions.  This goes beyond reporting and allows location managers to take increased ownership of the experience delivered at their locations.

Help ensure consistency across all locations

CEM programs can help ensure that all of your local managers understand the key elements of a brand promise and what factors they control to ensure they are delivering it. One of the most valuable assets multi-unit brands have is their top performing locations.  Not only are they big contributors of profits but decoding their formula for success can be a key to brand growth.  Location focused CEM programs have the ability to raise the performance of all locations by providing local managers with insights on best practices from top locations and how best to apply them.

Coach local managers on what to fix and how to execute

Today’s CEM programs eliminate wasted time spent reading and interpreting reports.  Instead, local managers are focused on the most important area to improve and spend their time ensuring the correct front line execution.  Locations control an action plan based on best practices to tailor the execution to the needs of their specific teams.

Whether on the basketball court or in the game of retail, consistency is often the key to rising above the competition. The good news for retailers out there is there is help available. A well thought out CEM program can be the key to ensuring a recipe for retail success is within reach. As for Jeremy Lin, we sports fans will have to wait and see if he can rise to challenge put in front of him.

The kids were barely back to school before the first ‘Celebrate Christmas for £9.99!’ posters started to appear, and with November now upon us, consumer appetite for all things festive is going to start accelerating.

The Christmas party market is currently believed to be worth around £1billion, so even in challenging financial times, there is a huge opportunity for operators with a strong offer. While competition is tougher than ever and the market is unlikely to grow this year, there is certainly a chance to increase market share.

For a customer experience management (CEM) professional like me, it’s not only this commercial potential that is exciting, but also the huge amounts of intelligence that will be collected over the Yuletide period, which will provide pointers for quick fixes this year, as well as more strategic planning for 2013.

A great CEM programme will deliver insight into which elements of hospitality have a link to customer loyalty and thereby repeat business. However, at Christmas, your regular guests might have a very different agenda from their regular visits and what is usually important may go out of the window.

• Food quality might not be as important as ‘ease of ordering’ for a party of disparate work colleagues who would never normally break bread together (I am not describing the Empathica Christmas party here…).
• Whoever is the office party organiser will want things to run smoothly and keeping it simple may well pay off.
• Budgets may be tight but a classic Christmas dinner with all the trimmings – and no washing up – could well be worth paying for.

Learning from past years across the sector, three interesting areas to monitor are:

1. Server attitude underpins the experience

You may have hired plenty of seasonal staff to support the rush, but if they are not happy dealing with customers, you may have made things worse, not better. How are you going to ensure that they are supported by experienced team members to deliver a level of service that is your customers expect?

2. Menu design can have unexpected effects

You have differentiated your brand’s Christmas dinner with a delicious chestnut stuffing, which people loved in your test kitchen. Have you tested it in a real kitchen? If not, are you sure that its unique preparation process won’t put the kibosh on everything else? We have seen organisations scrap dynamite new ideas after a couple of days because their service speed scores are so badly affected. Make sure you’re watching this closely.

3. The festive spirit

Even the most abstemious of us enjoy a drink at Christmas. Are your team switched on to taking the maximum number of drinks orders, and upselling? There are lots of people to serve, but taking the time to take a drinks round can make the difference between a good and bad office party, and future loyalty. And turning an order of a couple of bottles of wine into a couple of bottles of prosecco can make your guests’ evening and increase your take (done responsibly, of course). Have you got measures to enable you to monitor availability and upsell?

Over the 10 years working with leading global brands, we’ve learned that sometimes it’s executing the basics well that allows brands to break through to new levels of success. Here are some of the key lessons we’ve taken from our retail and hospitality programmes on improving customer experiences:

1. Customers are eager to connect with businesses they frequent

85% of consumers are willing to provide feedback to the retailers they frequent. The challenge is ensuring their feedback is acknowledged and acted upon. Sadly, the same study showed that only 29% believe this feedback is used to improve the customer experience.

2. Drive response rates to ensure an appropriate sample size

Insights are only as good as the data sample being analysed. While many customers will be proactive in providing feedback, some will need added incentives like discounts or a sweepstake entry.

3. Customers vary – so should feedback mechanisms they are offered

Whether it’s younger customers consolidating all their communication on a mobile device or an older person wanting to use a landline telephone, feedback programmes need to take into account customers’ technology preferences.

4. It is often the little things that define the best experiences

It’s often the subtle factors that lie just beneath the surface of the obvious drivers of satisfaction that separate merely good experiences from truly great ones. Understanding those is key to moving experiences from good to great.

5. A survey shouldn’t be an interrogation

Feedback starts with asking the right questions. The right questions should always be personal to both your brand and your customers. You need to focus on your own brand strengths and exploit competitors’ weaknesses.

6. Commitment and focus are the first steps in driving change

All employees of a brand need to be engaged and accountable. The real key is in changing the behaviour of front line staff to prioritise the areas that will have the most impact, focus on specific improvements and follow through with a tangible level of commitment.

7. Delivering great experiences is a marathon, not a sprint

It’s only with that consistency built up over the lifespan of the customer relationship can lasting loyalty be built – the type of loyalty that can translate into advocacy.

8. Brand insights can reveal the keys to future success

Customer feedback can serve to answer three basic questions: How are we performing as a brand in the eyes of our customers? What is broken or needs improvement in how we are executing? Where should we be headed next, to stay top of mind with customers?

9. Multiple channels, one experience

Brands must provide a consistent experience, delivering the same brand promise at each point of their customers’ journey. Feedback programmes can ensure each channel is consistent with the desired brand experience, enabling businesses to maintain a strong brand identity across what may be disparate parts of their operations.

10. Drive advocacy by engaging the social consumer

Once brands have invested in a customer experience management programme, it is important to convert loyal customers into brand advocates by making it easy for them to share their positive brand experiences via social media platforms.

In Summary

Customer feedback programmes have at their heart a simple goal – connecting brands with their customers whose support is their lifeblood. By opening up this vital channel of communication not only can brands get a view into how they are delivering in the eyes of their customers, but also unlock their own formula for ensuring they can sustain their success on an ongoing basis – at every location, in every department, on every shift.

The cooler autumn weather and the children returning to school signal one thing for many households in America… the return of NFL football.

It’s also around this time that many football fans begin to exhibit some interesting behavior. Premature championship celebration. After only a handful of games many fans are already preparing their Superbowl celebration party. However if there is one lesson I’ve learned as a lifelong football fan it’s that a handful of early season games is rarely a good predictor of the future. A full 16 game season can be long and it’s usually not the fast starting teams who win it all, but the most consistent.

The phenomena holds true when it comes to customer experience as well. Launching new products or seasonal marketing campaigns might prompt a temporary spike in great customer experiences for a retailer, but ultimately the best brands are the ones who are able to deliver on their promises day in and day out, from one location to another. Front line staff needs to be fully engaged and accountable each and every day to do so. Great store managers know this, and they understand that the real key to maintaining great experiences is in changing the staff behavior for the better. Behavior that drives exceptional in-store experiences are the catalyst for advocacy.

There’s a simple four step process to helping make this happen:

1. Start with helping location managers focus front line staff on specific areas that can have the biggest impact and doing so in a consistent manner.

Focusing on doing the right things shouldn’t be a onetime event, it needs to be an ongoing philosophy. One way to ensure ongoing improvement is to leverage the power of your own internal community through social sharing. Let location managers learn from each other, to provide support and best practices.

2. Create a program where you ask for commitment to making improvements.

Committing to those focus area improvements is a significant emotional step and encourages a more meaningful level of engagement for location managers with their customer experience programs. Commitment and engagement also provide a different kind of measurement for area and regional managers to have conversations with local managers about improvement rather than blame.

3. Once the commitment is made, then it’s all about driving actions.

Providing location managers with action plans to encourage the right behaviors at the right times for all their employees. These actions can be built from brand best practices, and they can be enhanced through the power of social sharing and the knowledge of other managers across the brand. This living library of actions ensures that local improvements aren’t a onetime activity but are an ongoing part of your brand’s culture.

4. On a regular basis location managers should have an opportunity to reflect back on what worked and what needed improvement for next time.

This ongoing cycle of action and review provides location managers a powerful tool to reflect back on what worked and what to focus on moving forward.

Whether the goal is to win the Superbowl or to build a winning retail brand, the key is consistency. While not every NFL team has access to the same player talent and fan base, all retail brands today have access to the modern tools and programs to ensure their front line staff is fully engaged and delivering every day.